In the Distance Education scenario in India, monitoring is a much-neglected process. 'lhe potential of this process has been
adequately perceived but not realised in a commensurate way. In this paper Lakshmi Chandra compares the place of monitoring in the Department of Distance Education. Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL) with that of the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) and the Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University (BRAOU). She afso depicts the status of monitoring at the Open University, Milton Keynes, U.K. and then suggests a scheme which could prove useful in the Indian context. Articles such this, we hope, will induce further thinking on this much neglected area of monitoring in individual
institutions and thus persuade the practitioners of Distance Education to give monitoring its due place. Some of the observations made by the author on monitoring at IGNOU and other institutions are her own which nced not be treated as the stated policies of the institutions concerned.